Tuesday, October 30, 2012

I love New York. You took me in and helped me to grow up.When I was 20 years old, I moved into a tenement in Hell's Kitchen -- 602 Tenth Avenue, NYC. I lived in Manhattan for 14 years, through supremely happy days and very painful ones.

One favorite memory is the blackout of 1965. I was on the top floor of Macy's. The lights went out. The escalator's stopped. We all fumbled our way down to the ground floor and out into totally dark Manhattan.

I lived on West 15th Street. Not much of a walk down from 34th Street. In no time, people with flashlights appeared, some directing traffic through the dark intersections. Candles appeared in windows.

That evening, since the buzzer system was out, a friend tossed penny's at our second floor window until we went down and unlocked the front door. What makes the memory happy is the peaceful, mysterious, we're all in this together, whatever it is quality of the experience.

Speedy recovery, NYC, NJ, and all of the East Coast of America. Cheering you on!

Sunday, October 21, 2012

With the holidays in full swing this question gains importance by the day. Before you shop 'til you drop, work yourself to a frazzle, worry yourself into a tizzy, or max out your credit card, remember The You Factor

Question: Who comes first? You or other people?

Answer: There is no first or second, third or fourth. Always factor in your own well-being. Then in every situation, in every circumstance, you can allow your generous spirit to flow freely. You can share your love and abundance, but never to your own detriment.

You can also factor in everyone's well-being. You may not know what to do, or how it will work out, but if you want happy days for all, you will most likely find life-enhancing solutions to the challenges you meet.

The ramifications? When you break out from the limiting belief that someone has to come first and others merely trail along, picking at left-overs, you never have to harden your heart or judge someone harshly. You are free to pursue an optimal outcome for yourself and include everyone involved.

Wishing you wonderful holidays, great happiness, and success with the You Factor!

Thanks to Robert Endo, who once said to me, "Yeah, but you've got to factor in your own well-being too, Mandy."

Thursday, October 4, 2012

In a recent interview Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi said, "Unless we are free we cannot realize out true potential."
She is a great and gracious hero who lived under house arrest for two decades for the cause of freedom in her beloved Burma.
Her words have inspired millions of people to stand up for freedom in peace and with dignity.

Those particular words, "Unless we are free we cannot realize out true potential" hit home, giving me a deeper perspective on my own work. The greatest freedom we can claim is inner freedom, especially the freedom to be happy in all of its glorious forms: peace, delight, curiosity, gratitude, love, bliss, contentment -- so many faces of happiness!
Until we know how to break out from the prisons of our own limiting beliefs we cannot liberate ourselves.

Few, if any of us, will meet the challenges that Aung San Suu Kyi took on. But all of us will face birth and death, sickness and health, better times and worse ones.
I don't know about you, but when I grew up, I had NO guidelines for how to understand my inner reality, my belief systems, or my emotional reactions to the ever-changing events around me. It took a course in the Option Method at a school for group counselling in NYC GROW) with Bruce Di Marsico for me to open my eyes and catch my first glimpse of freedom.

I began to see that my perceptions of reality, my conclusions about what happened, the meaning I ascribed to what people said and did governed my responses -- especially my emotional responses.
Since that time, in 1972, I learned more from Bruce Di Marsico and other magnificent teachers like Ram Dass, Pierre Pannetier, and Werner Erhard. Books by Jane Roberts and Joseph Murphy shook my world view, in a wonderful way. Friends and colleagues, Micheal Neill and Joe Vitale encouraged me and shared their wisom.

Most of all I have learned from my own deep exploration of my own limiting beliefs and feelings and working with courageous students to explore theirs.
I put the very best of what I've learned into two books:

I wish every one could read them. I'm not the world's best marketer. I have no desire for fame or a huge fortune. I just want to share the greatest gifts I have ever received: The gift of happiness and the gift of recovery.
I was thinking about how to do that this morning, so I wrote this blog post. My message is simple, if you want break out from beliefs that block happiness and success, read my books. I'm pretty sure they will help you.
If you have read them and found them useful, please tell other people about them.
Because: "Unless we are free we cannot realize out true potential" and you have many gifts to share.

Monday, October 1, 2012

My sweet mountain cabin is in escrow. I welcome a smooth closing. Losing more money than I ever imagined having at one point. Having traded up through 4 fixer houses and 2 condos over 35 years to achieve this monumental loss, I hope the new owners enjoy it and thrive in it.

It reminds me of the old saying "There is no greater burden than a tool that is no longer useful." I'll be relieved to let it go and move on more freely.

Some of my friends express surprise that I am not really upset about all of this money going down the drain, or wherever it goes. Indeed psychological studies show the we humans will give up multiple opportunities for profit in order to avoid taking a loss. Why?

This brings up a bunch of questions. The answers have helped me and my students cut a lot of losses and a lot of unhappiness. See if they are useful for you.

Does losing money have to be painful?
No. I think the pain is in the meaning. Different losses mean various things to different people at different times in their lives.

This loss of money doesn't hurt a bit. Whatever I have lost is already gone. I want to be free from the burden of an unwanted cabin in the mountains more than I want to keep the hope that someday prices may come back up. It is a loss I can afford and maybe that is a factor. Usually the pain we feel is in proportion to the perceived importance of what we lose.

Is losing money shameful? In my work I've noticed that deep feelings of shame often accompany financial losses. That one mystifies me. Do you think losing money needs to generate shame? I fail to see anything shameful in losing money. Lessons to learn, yes. Shame, no. Unless there is wrong-doing involved, like a Bernie Madoff scheme. But then, I'm not a fan of shame anyway. It only takes a moment to recognize wrong-doing and shame blocks creative energy that could be used to set things right, or improve them as best we can.

Is a finding the positive the only way to avoid the pain? I am not wild about positive thinking. Positive is pretty. Negative is depressing. The truth is beautiful. The truth is that buying that cute little cabin is on the top of my "What Was I Thinking?!?" list. It brought a bunch of problems and disasters from day one, though things have been pretty peaceful for the last couple of years.

Do we need to feel pain in order to learn from our experience? Why would that be true? Although we can learn from pain, we can also learn from curiosity, insight, delight, discovering new information and inspiration -- to name just a few other powerful ways to learn.

Does losing money mean you are stupid?A loser? Careless? Sometimes the most well-thought-out decisions come with unintended consequences. Often you just can't tell until you get there.

What are you concerned would happen if you lost a lot of money and felt just fine -- not because you lost money, just fine anyway? Over the years people have answered with many of the concerns above. They believed they would be a little crazy if they didn't feel bad, or that they would then be shameful and unconcerned. Some thought if they didn't feel bad, it would mean they didn't care. When we explored those limiting beliefs they proved false every time.

Does losing money make you angry? Events by themselves do not govern our emotions. Limiting, self-defeating beliefs about what happens and ourselves determine our reactions.

Does losing money decrease your hopes for happiness? In the great mysterious unknown of life we encounter infinite opportunities to be happy. Since I have a great deal to learn before I achieve enlightenment, I confess to some doubts on this one. For example, if I had only enough money to feed my children and did not know another way to provide for them, and I lost it. If they were hungry, or even perished because of the loss, the idea of being happy is a big stretch. It would rank at the top of the perceived importance of the loss scale. Still, no matter what, I would want to be happy again as soon as I could.

Are you willing to be happy? Did you, like so many people in these last years, lose money, maybe lots of it? Would it be OK with you to fill your life with happiness, creativity and new prospects for prosperity? Could you recover from your loss and break out to happiness right now?

I hope your answer is yes, because the choices we make when we are happy and at peace send us down a different path from the ones we take when we feel sad, stupid, ashamed and angry.

Cheering you on to happily cutting your losses if you want to -- great success and prosperity.